Stephen J. Ceci of the psychology department at Cornell, with his associates Shulamit Kahn and Wendy M. Williams, have looked at reports of gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020.
Their findings are good news and contradict the common narrative.
Professor Ceci provided this statement to Legal Insurrection on the study:
Today, our 5-year project–an adversarial collaboration–was published as a 47,000 word target article (59 journal pages) in the prestigious journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. (It is Open Access here.) Below is a brief description of our extensive analyses.Our research responds to claims, in top science journals and major media, that female scientists in academia are victims of sexism. Many (if not most) educated readers believe that the lack of women in engineering, computer science, physics, and related disciplines is due to bias that makes it harder for women to be hired, get their work reviewed fairly, get published, get grants, have their teaching evaluated fairly, and be paid fairly.My colleagues and I meta-analyzed the corpus of research in each of these areas, dating from 2000-2020. The good news is that women are actually at parity with men in journal publishing, peer review, and grant-getting. And for hiring, women have a substantial advantage over men and are more likely to be hired with equivalent records. However, for teaching ratings and salary, we found some bias; women get lower teaching ratings and less pay, although the salary gap is only about one-fifth of what is customarily reported in the media (around a 4% pay gap rather than the commonly touted “women only earn 82 cents for every dollar that men earn”.What’s important and remarkable about these findings is that they show that women overall enjoy gender fairness in most areas of academic science. The former salary gap has been reduced by about 80% (to around 4%), and can be further addressed by salary reviews initiated by institutions. (The substantial resources now directed toward achieving gender-fairness in hiring—with most universities mandating anti-bias training—can be redirected toward reducing gender salary gaps, for example.) Bias in teaching ratings can be addressed by augmenting the use of subjective assessments by students with objective measures of actual learning.These findings mean that the academy now offers a largely gender-fair (and in some areas, female-advantaged) environment, and the constant doom-and-gloom portrayals, which ironically could discourage many young women from becoming scientists, are no longer valid. More women might become scientists if they knew that the job was not riddled with sexism and if they appreciated that their chances of being hired are substantially greater than those of men with comparable. Accomplishments. Our country desperately needs the contributions of talented women scientists. Happily, the realities of today no longer support the belief that these jobs are pervasively biased against women. In our view, this message is worth spreading because it runs counter to the dominant narrative in our universities and our society more generally.
The study is exhaustive, and you can read the whole thing here.
Here are a couple of noteworthy excerpts:
The vast majority of findings—from (a) synthetic cohort analysis, (b) institutional hiring records, and (c) experiments—indicate that women are less likely than men to apply for tenure-track jobs, but when they do apply, they receive offers at an equal or higher rate than men do. Even though these three sources of evidence cannot be meta-analyzed, their findings, and those in powerful new experiments,8 point in the same direction and are not consistent with claims of widespread bias against hiring women for tenure-track jobs. These conclusions extended to studies discussed here from the 1990s. However, there are no experimental studies of academic hiring between 1960 and 1990. Evidence from outside academia, including Schaerer et al.’s (2022) meta-analysis, suggests decreasing gender bias in hiring from 1976 to 2009; similarly, Birkelund et al.’s (2022) harmonized, cross-national callback analysis shows no discrimination against women in six countries differing along institutional, cultural, and economic dimensions.9None of this means that women do not face very real barriers in completing their doctoral and postdoctoral training and segueing to tenure-track careers. For example, women are more likely than men to give up their initial aspirations to become tenure-track professors while in graduate school, a finding primarily true of women with children or contemplating children. Undoubtedly, broad systemic factors are partly responsible, along with biological factors, for these women not applying for tenure-track positions. But the data do show that the reason women do not occupy a larger fraction of tenure-track positions is not because of a discriminatory tenure-track hiring process, as many researchers have alleged.Inconsistent evidence of gender biasAlthough there is no prima facie evidence of pervasive gender bias, there may be bias in specific fields, at specific times, and/or in specific journals. For instance, Berg (2017) analyzed acceptance rates of articles submitted to Science. He studied a sample of 2,650 accepted manuscripts in 2015 and a similarly sized not-accepted sample. He found no significant gender differences for either, with numerically higher acceptance rates for junior first-author women and lower rates for senior women. Berg and his team have since analyzed a larger set of 66,057 articles published in Science between 2010 and 2017 (Berg, 2019) but to date have published only results for the category termed “Reports.” As in their 2015 sample, there were no significant gender differences in acceptances over the period from 2010 to 2017 for either “first author” or “corresponding author.” Year to year and across fields, both genders’ advantages in acceptance rates fluctuate. However, there are some differences by field. First, in physical sciences, acceptance rates for male corresponding authors were higher than for women for the period from 2012 to 2016 (although Berg found the same acceptance rates for women and men before and after this period), whereas acceptance rates were equal for male and female first authors since 2013. The second difference is that in the life sciences, women’s acceptance rates were higher than men’s from 2016 to 2017 for both types of author.
Again, the research is extremely thorough, but if this is an area of interest for you, you’ll have lots of reading to do.
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